Search Results for: dream,-the

Orbitsville is the scene of two of Bob Shaw’s most successful novels and is possibly the most gigantic artefact ever dreamed up by an SF writer – a vast hollow world completely enclosing its sun, habitable across its entire inner surface. At the end of ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE the whole world was shifted to an alternative universe. In a conclusion which is both stunning and moving, ORBITSVILLE JUDGEMENT tells what happens next…

Thorinn went down. He had little choice, since his own father had hurled him into a well.

Yet the world was shifting in those days, and Thorinn was to go deeper than his father had ever dreamed; destined to discover strange worlds within worlds, to meet beasts undreamed of, and to discover that which few of us are permitted to know:

His Own True Name.

On the poisonous, icy surface of Ganymede, a man and a boy are on a deadly hunt. Their prey is the Aleph – an unknowable alien artifact that roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless millennia. Indescribable, infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men’s dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet. Now in a modern world ancient struggle is joined, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment, and a society seeks the power to rule the universe.

Sixteen stories about secret places and mean men, containing:

About a Secret Crocodile
Mad Man
Nor Limestone Islands
The Man Underneath
Boomer Flats
This Grand Carcass Yet
In the Garden
Groaning Hinges of the World
Golden Trabant
How They Gave It Back
Maybe Jones and the City
Seven Story Dream
Adam Had Three Brothers
Pig in a Pokey
The Weirdest World
The Ultimate Creature

The Civilizations of the First and Second Man have been destroyed by the products of their own technology. Now the world is emerging from a new dark age into the dawn of a second Middle Ages. Britain is dominated by a Luddite Church and by the doctrine that all machines are evil.
Into this strange world comes Kieron, an artist’s apprentice who is inflamed by a forbidden dream – to construct a flying machine which will enable man to soar through the air like a bird.

Ten tantalizing tales of man, woman and child – and their cosmic connections…

Contents:
Angel Fix (1974)
Beaver Tears (1976)
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! (1976)
The Screwfly Solution (1977)
Time-Sharing Angel (1977)
We Who Stole the Dream (1978)
Slow Music (1980)
A Source of Innocent Merriment (1980)
Out of the Everywhere (1981)
With Delicate Mad Hands (1981)

In plain English, at 4 a. m., a ray of light had been observed on the disc of the planet Mars in or near the “terminator”; that is to say, the zone of twilight separating day from night. The news was doubly interesting to me, because a singular dream of “Sunrise in the Moon” had quickened my imagination as to the wonders of the universe beyond our little globe, and because of a never-to-be-forgotten experience of mine with an aged astronomer several years ago…

‘I had a hunch that madness was a predominant theme and normal condition for Americans living in the second half of this century’ Charles Willeford

Willeford’s pulp classic features six incisive tales as fresh as the day they were first published in 1963. Writing at a time when we still had some faith in our elected leaders, Willeford laid bare the American Dream – and 50 years later his revelations are as chilling and relevant as ever.

Life on Earth was intolerable – and yet Man had stayed there, his dreams and potential suffocating under the dead weight of bureaucracy.

The stars were attainable – thanks to the Infall Drive – but only a few heard the call of deep space. Some had already gone to colonise a new world. The second ship was ready at last. Ready to escape the Earth’s prison; ready to seek refuge in deepest space. But it wasn’t only freedom that awaited it…

The Gem Planet, the Storm Planet, the Sand Planet . . . one of these three marvel worlds held the secret Casher O’Neill sought. Casher had wandered the inhabited galaxy seeking justice, seeking the cosmic power that would enable him to return to his home world and overthrow its usurper. But in the search he found much more than he had sought, for there were things more incredible among the stars than he had dreamed of.

In the far future, it has become possible in advanced psychotherapy for a man to be given dreams as vivid as reality in which he may play any part he chooses. If that man were inclined to see his life as a struggle between good and evil, and if he were blessed with a profound sense of the black humour inherent in his situation, he might choose to play the part of Jesus, called the Christ. If he were inclined to write a book, it might be this one.

Tileman could make our fantasies come true – create reality from your dreams – for a very high fee. Catering to the desires of London’s most powerful – and decadent – figures, Tileman had top-level connections to guarantee him protection and influence.

But he had killed Laird Walker’s best friend – and Walker, the dead man’s sister, and a bizarre nightclub entertainer began a private war on Tileman…a war whose final battle was unimaginable horror.

Man reached for the stars – and failed to keep the Earth in his grasp. With the western United States devastated by drought, the survivors huddle in squalid concentration camps in the east.

And still the dream won’t go away. In high orbit, an artefact is found that may be man’s first contact with aliens. The only woman who can decode it has found her future in the past, in the remote Indian territories of the Pacific Northwest. But in which direction does the planet’s survival lie?

IN THE BEGINNING . . .
There was no Brooklyn, no St. Louis, no Shakespeare, no moon, no hunger, no death . . .

IN THE BEGINNING . . .
There were no real men, no real women, nothing but the dispassionately passionate ambisexuals of the lowest and highest order . . .

IN THE BEGINNING . . .
The heavens, the seas and the Earth belonged to a more intelligent species than a man called Clay could ever have dreamed possible in his own time . . . but his own time as a man had passed, and now his time as the son of man had come!

He was suspended alone and unprotected in the sea of forgetfulness where Saturn looked brilliant against the sunless black of deep outer space.

It was like an elusive dream of a past only half-remembered, forever just out of reach amid the shifting galaxies of deep space. Somewhere out there he had lost his memory – space amnesia they called it. But they had found him and brought him back and given him a memory again.

But was it his memory?

George Fraser, a lonely, timid fellow, lives in a dream world of gangsters, gunfights and beautiful women. He begins to imagine himself as the toughest gangster of them all to bolster up his feeling of inferiority. But George boasts once too often – and to the wrong person.

From that moment on, harmless George is caught up in a deadly net of intrigue, and finds himself committing the deadliest act of all …

‘An intelligent and harshly revealing piece of work with not a little serious penetration and power’ The Times

Bjorn and Frytha share a bond, both orphans and survivors of Norman attacks on their homes in the Lake country. Growing up together in Jarl Buthar’s Norse stronghold, they become fast friends, with Bjorn dreaming of becoming a harper like his father.

As they come of age within this secret fortress, they hear word of the Norman attacks beyond their walls, drawing ever closer to the safety of their home.

Can they help protect their adoptive home and family, or will they lose everything all over again?

Though they live fulfilling, independent lives in three different countries, Olivia Segal, Jamie Arias and Annie Aldrich Thomas remain bound to each other by a past tragedy – and by their pact always to be there for each other at times of great need.

In a London vault lies a story waiting to be read; a tale of evil more than fifty years old, a link with the past and a present danger more terrifying than anything the friends could have dreamed up in their wildest nightmares.

Zabul was no ordinary world. It was a private religious sanctuary – location secret, visitors unwelcome. It was a world fanatically dedicated to one belief and to one goal. The belief that mankind originated on a single world . . . the goal was to find it.

To find Earth was a goal that Earl Dumarest shared. But how much did he really have in common with the zealot Terridae, who slept in caskets decorated with the zodiacs and dreamed of soaring towers of crystal and floating cities? And what were their despotic Guardians really after?





(First published 1981)

Bill Hastings was one in a million. He was the winner of a planet-wide contest, and the prize was a chance to spend a year working at the 1992 World’s Fair. For the young xenobiology student, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Fifty thousand miles above the Earth, a gigantic satellite moved in its elegant orbit. It would be Bill’s home for a year, and host to hundreds of thousands of visitors. The 1992 World’s Fair was to be an orbital extravaganza, and Bill Hastings thought that his dreams had come true. He had a lot to learn.

Ron Bronston was sworn to protect the United Planets’ dream – the pursuit of freedom and progress on all of the 3000 human-inhabited planets of the galaxy.
As an operative of the secret section of the United Planets’ Bureau of Investigation, Bronston was called upon for some very unusual missions. But the present crisis was without precedent.
Man’s sovereignty in his galaxy was challenged by a single madman and the super-weapons of the Dawnmen, the mysterious aliens from the unexplored vastness of the galaxy’s center. Bronston, alone, had to find a way to stop them.

Sixteen humans have come together on Damien, a distant world where once, dreams were stolen and atrocities took place. They have gathered to view the last rising of a manmade nova, the testament to a war none can forget.

Soon, time will warp and masks will fall. Soon, violence will erupt anew – along with treachery, horror, murder, release and love.

Soon, some will find justice . . . and others, judgement. Soon.

Now, sixteen humans have gathered – to await the light of the Murdered Star.

In this final volume of the Dancing Gods series, Ruddygore and his heroes must face an ancient evil seeping forth from the Sea of Dreams.

Long dormant evil is rising to challenge reality as we know it and it will destroy Earth and the magical world of Husaguahr if left to its own devices.

The Rules require the Great McGuffin to challenge and stop the evil forces, but McGuffini is lost in Hell and Ruddygore must, once again, depend on the skills Marge and Joe (and Joe’s estranged son, Irving).

His name was Robert Coffin, but the Maori natives called him Iron Hair. A civilized man in the raw wilderness of New Zealand, he had come to forge a nation at the end of the world – and discovered a magical world beyond his strangest dreams.

A world of astonishing beauty and breathtaking adventure, the natives called it the Land of the Long White Cloud. And Robert Coffin was about to enter its greatest mystery, cast in the wondrous spell of a shaman whose magic would change his life forever…